Unless you believe in paleoacoustics, the earliest known recorded music in existence is a chorus of 4000 voices singing an excerpt of Handel’s Israel in Egypt recorded over 100 yards away on June 29, 1888.

My favorite is the third selection, “After dinner toast at Little Menlo.” Composer Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) was “astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.”

Made on paraffin wax cylinders, the recordings are profoundly low-fi. A century later, “music” comes full circle. Anyone following the frontiers of music (think Bernhard Gunter, Francisco Lopez, Steve Roden, et al.) knows that previously undesirable audio artifacts (bristling pops and ticks, shrouds of hiss) have been part of the composer’s arsenal for the last decade. Today’s glitch is tomorrow’s melody.